Grab them by the what?

IKNOW! This is a fam­ily news­pa­per! But how can we dis­cuss the events of these ter­ri­ble days with­out ter­ri­ble lan­guage? That’s the chal­lenge. Let me ex­plain. I had a Trumpian mo­ment when Chris Gayle awk­wardly ap­proached an Aus­tralian jour­nal­ist and I com­men­tated that the world was over­re­act­ing.

The ar­ti­cle drew a swift re­sponse from then Deputy Op­po­si­tion Spokesman on Jus­tice Kent Gam­mon, who felt that The Gleaner needed to en­force some stan­dards up in this piece!

“I find the words pub­lished in The Sun­day Gleaner on Jan­uary 10, 2016 by Daniel Th­waites, “Chris Gayle beg likkle p** p** from a white girl on TV and it’s like the whole world wants to lose dem god­damn mind!”, not only crude, but un­be­com­ing of The Gleaner. I think The Gleaner should apol­o­gise to those of us with some re­fine­ment and a sense of shame ... . ”

My first thought: This spokesgirl is too ob­vi­ously en­thused with cen­sor­ship! So I penned a re­sponse ti­tled ‘Kent Gam­mon ’fraid ah ‘p** p**’, deal­ing, nat­u­rally, with the cen­tral­ity of this word.

But then it dawned on me that the guy sorta had a point, protest­ing against creep­ing vul­gar­ity. So I shelved the idea of chal­leng­ing him to a duel.

Still, please get real! No child’s vir­ginal eyes are en­coun­ter­ing these words for the first time in The Gleaner. By the time they can read, they’re recit­ing Kar­tel and Spice like bi­b­li­cal pas­sages, and if an in­no­cent wres­tles with the ed­i­to­ri­als, they’ll be worse cor­rupted by pol­i­tics than by a likkle word or two.

Any­way, with that as apolo­getic pref­ace, I still have to ig­nore the ken­tish rules to dis­cuss Don­ald Trump. Say what you want about The Don­ald, he has a true gift for mem­o­rable phrase­ol­ogy that riles up the re­fined.

“You’re fired!” “Low-en­ergy Jeb!” “Hi­lary ‘Rot­ten’ Clin­ton”.

Hil­lary: “It’s just aw­fully good that some­one with the tem­per­a­ment of Don­ald Trump is not in charge of the laws in our coun­try.”

Trump: “Be­cause you’d be in jail.”

Most mem­o­rably, he has added a new phrase to our po­lit­i­cal lex­i­con: “And when you’re a star ... . You can do any­thing – grab them by the ‘Lawd, have mercy!’”

TRUMP-LIKE IMAG­I­NA­TION

Lis­ten to Trump and it’s only af­ter­wards that you re­alise he’s just in­ap­pro­pri­ately groped your mind-boobs and date-raped your sen­si­bil­i­ties. Even RuPaul, the fa­mous cross-dress­ing per­former, has ac­cused Don­ald of grop­ing his ‘mang­ina’.

When I heard that last one, like de­cent chaps ev­ery­where who have never thought, and cer­tainly never said any­thing re­motely like that, I won­dered to my­self, “What could ever in­duce a man to say such a thing?”

Just af­ter hav­ing that pu­ri­fy­ing anti-Trump thought, I tuned into the gov­ern­ment-spon­sored func­tion to hon­our the Rio ath­letes. There were empty seats, de­spite star ath­letes, an ex­cit­ing line-up of per­form­ers, and $80 mil­lion down the hole.

But it’s clear they in­tended to re­ally get peo­ple’s at­ten­tion by what­ever means nec­es­sary! And how was that to hap­pen? You guessed it - they wanted to grab them by the ‘Lawd, have mercy’.

Be­cause right af­ter an up­lift­ing gospel per­for­mance, there came DJ Spice, which is an in­ter­est­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion, sort of like how FLOW puts porn chan­nels right next to re­li­gious ones.

Still, they had to know that Spice’s out­put, how­ever high­qual­ity, does tend to cen­tre around her groin. And one of her most fa­mous songs is called A So Mi Like It of­fi­cially, but among the na­tives is known by Trum­pean phrase­ol­ogy: ‘Skin out mi p** p**’. “Skin out mi p** p** Pon the bu**y mi a wine and a bum bum

Bum, bum, bum, bum, paco bum, bum

Have mi b**ty just a jump and a bum, bu, bum, bu, bum.”

That’s a lot of ‘p** p**’ and ‘bum bum’ in one song! I trust Kent is fir­ing off a stern let­ter of com­plaint to An­drew and Babsy about their lack of re­fine­ment.

Then here comes more news. The Gov­ern­ment has de­cided to spend an­other $80 mil­lion on this new ‘dead ba­bies scan­dal’. What? Yes, they plan to grab ex­pec­tant moth­ers and check out dem ‘Lawd, have mercy’ again! Be­cause af­ter what could only have been a very cur­sory ‘in­ves­ti­ga­tion’, it was an­nounced that it is the moth­ers who are at fault.

Speak­ing of which, I’m ut­terly con­fused by that public de­fender’s find­ing that the orig­i­nal ‘dead ba­bies scan­dal’ was a non-event. If that is so, and it was a me­dia cre­ation de­signed to un­seat a min­is­ter, I would like to be­lieve that the dis­pensers of so­cial jus­tice will fer­ret out who is re­spon­si­ble for that po­lit­i­cal hit job and grab them up. Lawd, have mercy! I leave it to your Trum­p­like imag­i­na­tion as to where.